More and more companies are gaining significant returns on investment from converged infrastructure, which takes a “building block” approach to networking, compute and storage systems as well as a centralized approach to management. Gartner predicts that hyper-converged infrastructure—which the analyst firm sees as the third wave in integrated systems--will see a huge upswing in adoption in the next five years.

While the benefits of converged infrastructure are undeniable, so too are the changes this type of infrastructure can cause to a typical data center. No longer, for example, does IT staff have to spend weeks collecting requirements, sizing, planning, procuring equipment, deploying and testing when servicing a new application or requirements. Instead, the process is streamlined and much faster.